Knowledge Unique and effective design: Hamburg has given new life to their wayfinding system 31 October 2025 Cycling News General Signs are often overlooked but are an essential part of cycling infrastructure. They provide awareness, confidence, and direction to a cycling network. When designed effectively, they can be a game changer. Haskoning was recently tasked with designing the wayfinding for Hamburg’s growing cycling network. Heleen Buijs is a wayfinding designer with over 14 years of experience, currently working at Haskoning. Specializing in urban wayfinding systems, Heleen has designed projects for various cities in the Netherlands, with a focus on cycling infrastructure. We sat down with her to learn how she and her team tackled this unique project and transformed the signs in Hamburg’s streets. Image: ©Eva Haeberle What’s the unique challenge of Hamburg or working in this context? The biggest difference is scale. In the Netherlands, wayfinding for cycling is regulated by CROW guidelines, which somewhat limits creativity. This is why a lot of my work here focuses on bike parking. In Hamburg, we were asked to design wayfinding for an entire 300-kilometre network. That scale was completely new. In Hamburg, they have created a brand identity for bike culture in the city. Meaning everything to do with cycling will have the same look and feel. We had to integrate this into our wayfinding design. This was new and it was nice to use these unique colours and symbols. With such a big project across the whole city, where do you even begin? The most important is cycling there yourself. This really helps because then you can see the way people move. The scale of the city compared to the Netherlands is bigger, with broader roads and larger buildings. Also, there are people with different bikes and different postures on the bike compared to the Netherlands. This meant we needed to rethink the placement of the signs and markings. We had to check that reading distances are big enough for the speed that people have, make sure that contrast is high enough, and that not too much information was on a sign. Image: ©Eva Haeberle What does your new system bring to the table? With older designs, people only get the information at the point where they have to make a turn. Which is too late, especially if people cycle faster. We knew that even though we probably would have to keep this element, we had to build upon it and make more different elements so that we could guide people earlier. There’s a lot of signs that we’ve added that don’t show any destinations at all. They just show you’re still on route number four, for instance, and this is the way to go. By taking out these destinations, we could make the designs bolder. Altogether, this becomes a more exciting system to look at than just the straightforward white and red signs. Did you speak to people that were cycling and testing the route? Our first designs went through a lot of tests and revisions. In September 2023, we tested a six-kilometre-long route. For that entire route, we made a sign plan with new elements and temporary signs in the new design on that route. We did eye-tracking, where we put people on a bike with special glasses on, where we could see if they were actually looking at the signs, and which elements of the signs they were pausing longer at. We also did interviews before and after participants cycled a route and had big posters up for the time when the signs were there, where people could scan a QR code and fill in their feedback online. Image: ©Eva Haeberle What do those changes and learnings look like? Sometimes it’s size, for instance, that people felt that something was too small. What we also did, was adding a white border around all the signs so that they can be distinguished no matter what background. We have one big element on the totem which shows your route, all the destinations on it and where you are on the route. We’ve added some details there like adding the distance in kilometres. We also redesigned the entire backside of the totem so that we can show a map of the whole cycling network and a map of the immediate surroundings of the totem. This way, you can also use it as a guide while walking or cycling to find something in the area. So those changes were made afterwards, ranging from the very small to quite a big change. It’s most often details that people find handy or that could be a bit better. In general, the feedback back was quite positive. People liked the new design a lot more. They thought it really showed that Hamburg was doing something for cyclists. Image: ©Eva Haeberle Why is it so important to have good signage? For people who cycle somewhere every day, you still use it as a confirmation sometimes. Even if it’s just a quick glance and saying like, OK, I’m kind of on track and I’m this far from my destination. The signs also help people understand that the infrastructure is here. You show users that there’s a whole network and so many routes. It also helps if you are new or you want to find a new way, you kind of know that every route in the end will guide you towards the city centre. This is how most people travel, from their neighbourhoods to the city centre. They can say to themselves: “If I’m just following this number four, I will be on good infrastructure and I will get to the city centre.” I think it’s a great way to navigate without relying on your phone. Plus, with the rules now prohibiting you from holding your phone while cycling, you’re forced to find another place to keep it if you want to use it for navigation. You might put it in a bag or on your bike, but even then, it can be a distracting and disruptive habit. Signs, on the other hand, are more visible around you, making it easier and safer to navigate, as opposed to relying on digital navigation. Image: ©Haskoning What learnings do you bring from this project to your next projects? It’s the biggest and longest running wayfinding project, I’ve ever done. It’s also nice for me to see what can happen if you really think big. Instead of copying a design from previous projects in the Netherlands, we have inspired ourselves and created something completely new and tailor-made for the city. The uniform look and feel that Hamburg has created is really quite special. It’s also different than what we do in the Netherlands. I think it reaches broader than just the wayfinding elements. Everything works nicely together.